Nelson: The Essential Hero (27 page)

On 29 March he hoisted his blue flag at the mizzen of the
Vanguard
at Spithead. After a certain amount of confusion about his personal stores and belongings, Tom Allen no doubt silently blaming her Ladyship for neglect and Nelson exchanging messages with his wife ashore about absence of silk stockings and so forth, the Admiral could grow used to his surroundings. The wind blew foul, dead from the west, and Nelson wrote to Fanny that ‘as I am now fixed on board, it is my intention not to move out of the ship, to which I begin to be reconciled’. The letters went back and forth, but it was not until 7 April that he was able to get a last note ashore to say: ‘The wind is fair and we are getting under sail.’ He went on, ‘I pray God to bless you and soon to send us peace when believe me nothing in this world can exceed the pleasure I shall have in returning to you.’ The loving affection expressed in both their letters over all the years can hardly be equalled in the known correspondence of any married couple. Meanwhile, on 30 March, Lord Spencer had written to St Vincent that he was very happy to be sending him Sir Horatio Nelson, ‘because I have reason to believe that his being under your command will be agreeable to your wishes’. On 1 May, the day after he had joined St Vincent’s flag on the familiar blockading station off Cadiz, the latter was to write back to the First Lord that ‘. . . the arrival of Admiral Nelson has given me new life : you could not have gratified me more than in sending him, his presence in the Mediterranean is so very essential’. All was now set for one of the most dramatic moments of the war - the re-entry of the British fleet into the Mediterranean.

At this moment in Nelson’s life no assessment can better that of Admiral Mahan:

As the sails of the
Vanguard
dip below the horizon of England, a brief interlude begins, and when the curtain rises again, the scene is shifted, - surroundings have changed. We see again the same man, but standing at the opening of a new career, whose greatness exceeds by far even the high anticipations that had been formed for him. Before leaving England he is a man of distinction only; prominent, possibly, among the many distinguished men of his own profession, but the steady upward course has as yet been gradual, the shining of the light ... is still characterised by sustained growth in intensity rather than by rapid increase. No present sign so far foretells the sudden ascent to fame, the burst of meridian splendor with which the sun of his renown was soon to rise upon men’s eyes, and in which it ran its course to the cloudless finish of his day.

At the time when the
Vanguard
joined St Vincent’s fleet off Cadiz there was only one friend left to Britain in the whole of Europe, and that was Portugal; a somewhat timorous neutral who might be expected to fall into the enemy camp if France’s successes continued. Without the use of the Tagus for her fleet Britain would have had nowhere except Gibraltar, and ‘The Rock’ itself was heavily menaced by Spain. Elsewhere the revolutionary tide rolled unchecked over the continent. Austria had fallen in 1797, her defeat being largely attributed to the withdrawal of the British fleet from the Mediterranean. Lord Malmesbury’s peace mission, on which St Vincent among many others had placed great hopes, had broken down at Lille after the death of Catherine the Great of Russia, for the French felt that they had little to fear from her successor, the half-mad Paul I. Napoleon, who had been appointed by the Directory to command the army of the invasion of England, had come to the conclusion by February 1798 that this was impossible because ‘we shall not for many years acquire the control of the seas’. Instigated by Napoleon, the Directory had looked eastwards. He had suggested that the fleet under Vice-Admiral Brueys should descend upon Malta, that linch-pin of Mediterranean strategy, and seize the island from the Knights. The Order of St John had long been in a state of decline and, under their German Grand Master von Hompesch, was now completely apathetic, many of the French knights even being in correspondence with revolutionary France. With Malta as a base, with Sardinia and Corsica safe behind them, with the British absent from the inland sea, the way to Egypt and the East lay open to the army of France. India would be at their mercy, the Ottoman Empire would either remain their ally or would easily fall, and with the whole of the Mediterranean secure and the riches of the East to support him Napoleon could return ‘and give the enemy its death-blow’. Such was the grand strategy at which the British could only vaguely guess, but one thing they did know for sure was that the preparation of a vast armament was going ahead in southern France, and that the fleet at Toulon and Genoa was being readied for some large-scale expedition.

It was to ascertain what was going on at Toulon as well as to keep an eye on the eastern Mediterranean generally that St Vincent despatched Nelson from the fleet, in the latter’s own words ‘with a small squadron; not on any fighting expedition . . .’. He added for Fanny’s benefit, ‘England will not be invaded this summer. Bonaparte is gone back to Italy, where 80 thousand are embarking for some expedition.’ He reached Gibraltar with two other 74s in company, the
Orion
under Sir James Saumarez, and the
Alexander
under Captain Ball, together with four frigates and a sloop. The hospitality of the military in that strange limestone garrison was more than willingly extended to Sir Horatio, especially since he came with the news that once more the fighting ships of England were going to pass through the Strait and invade a Mediterranean that had seemed on the point of becoming no more than a French lake. On 8 May, having waited until dark so that no Spanish eyes should remark their eastward route, the squadron set course for the Gulf of Lions with the intention of running along the French coast to Toulon. In his final orders to the squadron Nelson had stressed the importance of the ships maintaining close contact and not getting separated at any cost. The weather, which continued good for several days, was to play him foul on 20 May - the very day after Napoleon had sailed from Toulon with over 30,000 troops in 300 transports, together with an escort of thirteen line-of-battle ships and seven frigates. A great game of hide-and-seek was soon to begin in the eastern Mediterranean.

The disaster which struck the
Vanguard
and its effect upon Nelson is best told in his own words to Fanny :

Figure to yourself a vain man, on Sunday evening at sunset, walking in his cabin with a Squadron about him, who looked up to their Chief to lead them to glory . . . Figure to yourself this proud, conceited man, when the sun rose on Monday morning, his Ship dismasted, his fleet dispersed, and himself in such distress, that the meanest Frigate out of France would have been a very unwelcome guest. But it has pleased Almighty God to bring us to a safe Port, where, although we are refused the rights of humanity, yet the
Vanguard
will in two days get to sea again, as an English Man-of-war.

What had happened was that, shortly after sunset, the wind which had blown from the northwest the previous day, driving the British off their station on the French coast, suddenly roared up again in one of those gales ‘which no canvas will withstand’. The Mediterranean, as many sailors have found, is a fickle sea, the wind in summer usually being too light for all but the smallest and fastest of sailing boats or else, with little warning, storming up to gale force and bringing with it as suddenly as it comes a short, dangerous, and breaking sea. (Being excessively saline and almost uncorrected by tides or tidal currents, the sea’s surface stirs up far more quickly than that of an ocean.) Berry had quickly got the
Vanguard
snugged down to a main storm -staysail, but the sea which built up, coupled with the violence of the wind, caused the ship to roll her masts out. ‘On Monday at half past one
a. m.
,’ in Nelson’s words, ‘the main top-mast went over the side, as did the mizen-top-mast soon afterwards . . . about half past three o’clock the foremast went in three pieces, and the bowsprit was found to be sprung in three places.’ In the darkness and the roar of the storm the squadron had lost contact with one another and no signals could be exchanged. Dawn found the
Vanguard
a wallowing semihulk some 75 miles south of the islands of Hyeres, with the
Alexander
,
Orion
, and the frigate
Emerald
still in company, the others lying to under bare poles. Throughout the day, during which the gale continued to blow as hard as ever, the
Vanguard
and the three still present out of the squadron laboured south-easterly in the direction of Sardinia. Over the next night the
Emerald
parted company; no doubt, being so much smaller, she was forced to heave to and her rate of drift was not so great as that of the 74s. It was not until Tuesday afternoon that the wind fell sufficiently for Ball in the
Alexander
to pass a tow to his disabled chief.

Nelson was now to be heavily beholden to a man whom, all those years before in France, he had dismissed as a coxcomb for wearing epaulettes in the French style. He was to find in Ball one of his greatest friends, and one of the closest of the ‘Band of Brothers’. Ball, who was to become the first governor of Malta after it was ultimately recaptured from the French, was a handsome man who was as intellectually distinguished as he was brave in action. Years later, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to go to Malta and become secretary to Sir Alexander Ball (as he had then become), the poet was to write of the seaman that his stay with Ball was ‘in many respects the most memorable and instructive period of my life’. This was the man whose seamanship now saved Nelson’s crippled vessel, towing her to within the safety of St Pietro Bay in southern Sardinia. Here the
Vanguard
was able to drop anchor in the lee of the rugged little island, secure from the westerly swell which had earlier very nearly had her on the rocks. Nelson, indeed, had at one moment signalled Ball to cast off the tow, shift for himself, and leave the
Vanguard
to her fate. Ball, with a Nelsonian disregard of orders, had managed to claw offshore -a magnificent example of seamanship, seeing that he was towing a heavy, part-filled hulk (the lower deck of the flagship had been cleared) under totally adverse conditions. He was to oblige his Admiral even further once the crippled man-of-war was securely anchored by helping his junior Berry with advice on the repair of the damage, and by lending his warrant carpenter, an old hand who had been thirty years in the Service, to assist in the rigging of jury masts. So well was the operation effected that only four days later
Vanguard
was once more on station with
Alexander
and
Orion
, having ‘a main top-mast for a foremast, and a top-gallant-mast for a top-mast, consequently everything else reduced in proportion’. The fact remains that, out of the three 74s to see out the gale, it was only the
Vanguard
that suffered damage - something which points to bad maintenance and, no matter whose fault this was, the responsibility must inevitably be laid upon the shoulders of her Captain.

Another event of major significance which resulted from the dismasting of the
Vanguard
and the scattering of the squadron was that Napoleon’s armada had slipped out of Toulon at the time that the British had been driven far to the south off their station. The fleet and the army destined for Egypt had passed through the Gulf of Genoa and had then headed southward between Corsica and Italy. All that Nelson knew at this juncture, after interrogating a French merchantman out of Marseilles, was that the French expedition had sailed for an unknown destination. He still could only guess at it, and it might be anywhere from Spain (to attack Portugal), to Naples and Sicily (to overthrow the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), or east to Egypt or even Constantinople. His frigates, in any case, had regrettably disappeared. He had news of them on 4 June, when the brig
Mutine
hove in sight. That stalwart friend whom he had saved in the Strait of Gibraltar, Captain Thomas Hardy, was in command. He was soon aboard to tell Nelson that the frigates had all repaired to Gibraltar, their captains being convinced that the
Vanguard
was so severely damaged that she would require the dockyard attention which only Gibraltar could provide. Frigates, the eyes of the fleet! The lack of them was to hamper him so severely over the coming weeks that Nelson no doubt resorted to that sailor-like language which pious biographers have deplored. Hardy, however, had very good news as well as bad. On 2 May an urgent message had reached St Vincent off Cadiz from the Admiralty ordering him to reinforce the Mediterranean. St Vincent, given the option of either coming in with his whole fleet or appointing an admiral in charge of a strong squadron for this purpose, had chosen Nelson. The Commander-in-Chief still felt that the Spaniards might come out and he was unwilling to abandon the blockade of Cadiz. He had chosen Nelson over the heads of two senior admirals (something which was to lead to a considerable amount of friction) and was sending him the flower of the fleet or, as he described them, ‘some choice fellows of the in-shore squadron’.

On their way to join Nelson was Troubridge in the
Culloden
, that old friend whom St Vincent himself regarded as even superior to Nelson (‘the very best Sea-officer in His Majesty’s Service’), along with Gould in the
Audacious
, Darby in the
Bellerophon
, Peyton in the
Defence,
Foley in the
Goliath,
Westcott in the
Majestic,
Louis in the
Minotaur,
Ben Hallowell in the
Swiftsure,
Miller in the
Theseus,
and Samuel Hood in the
Zealous.
All were 74s, commanded by some of the finest officers in the Navy, and St Vincent by despatching them under Nelson’s command had deprived himself of a large number of his best ships. They were also joined by the 50-gun
Leander
under Captain Thompson.